In these days, change in diet, etc. has brought a problem of increasing patients suffering from allergic diseases. Particularly, the increase of atopic diseases such as pollinosis, atopic dermatitis, bronchial asthma, allergic rhinitis and contact hypersensitivity has become to be a serious problem. Anti-histamic agents or steroids have been usually administered to symptomatically treat allergic diseases. However, such agents have a problem of causing serious side effects in their long-term use. Under these circumstances, a method for treating allergic diseases, which enables to effectively alleviate various symptoms thereof and which is applicable for a long-term use without affecting daily life, has been desired.
Recently, royal jelly (may be abbreviated as “RJ”, hereinafter) has been arousing public interest as a health food, while its various biological activities have been confirmed. Royal jelly is known to be a milky secretion from the exocrine of worker bees, and it is stored in queen cells in beehives, and it is a food for a larva to become a queen bee. Varying depending on its origin and harvesting season, the composition of royal jelly is known to be slightly changed in the range of 65–75% of water, 15–20% of proteins, 10–15% of carbohydrates, 1.7–6% of fats, and 0.7–2% of ash. J. Schimitzova et al. has succeeded to clone cDNAs of five major proteins contained in royal jelly using honeybee (Apis mellifera) and revealed their nucleotide sequences and putative amino acid sequences. The five proteins were named as “MRJP1”, “MRJP2”, “MRJP3”, “MRJP4”, and “MRJP5” by abbreviating the following capitals of “major royal jelly protein”. However, these proteins have not yet been studied on their biological activities.
Under the above circumstances, the present invention has an object to provide a method for effectively alleviating various symptoms caused by allergic diseases without causing serious side effects when applied to patients in need thereof.